Rice to seek to bolster Abbas in Ramallah talks

RAMALLAH, West Bank, Jan 14 (Reuters) US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, on a fresh West Asia peace drive, will seek to bolster President Mahmoud Abbas when she holds talks with the moderate Palestinian leader today.

The United States is trying to boost Abbas in his showdown with the ruling Hamas Islamists, a group Washington labels a terrorist entity. The United States plans to pour 86 million dollar into helping train and equip Abbas's presidential guard.

Rice met Israeli ministers yesterday but said she had not come to the region with a specific plan to jumpstart Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations that collapsed in 2000.

Palestinians officials said Abbas wanted to hear what Rice had to say, but they repeated the president's opposition to any talk of creating a Palestinian state with temporary borders.

Rice and Abbas will meet in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

''We want this to be the beginning of the endgame. It's high time the peace process was revived in order to implement negotiations on final status issues,'' said Saeb Erekat, a senior Abbas aide.

At a news conference with Rice in Jerusalem yesterday evening, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said moderate Palestinians needed a ''political horizon.'' She did not give details, but Israeli officials said Livni and Rice had been discussing the possibility of creating a Palestinian state with temporary borders following the line of a barrier Israel is building in and around the occupied West Bank.

Palestinians fear such borders would become final, leaving them with a truncated state.

Rice herself said she wanted to accelerate the 2003 US-backed peace ''road map''.

That blueprint has not moved past the first stage because of the failure of the Israelis and the Palestinians to meet their obligations -- Israel is supposed to halt settlement building in the West Bank while Palestinians must dismantle militant groups.

The second stage outlines a Palestinian state with provisional borders.

TIMETABLE Israeli deputy defence minister Efraim Sneh said he feared setting temporary borders would perpetuate the conflict, but argued the Palestinians needed to see a timetable for negotiations to reach an agreed settlement.

''If the Palestinian people aren't hopeful of obtaining their own state ... then we cannot defeat Hamas,'' Sneh, a senior member of the left-leaning Labour Party, told Israel Radio.

Hamas took office last March after trouncing Abbas's once dominant Fatah movement in elections, setting off a bitter power struggle.

At least 30 Palestinians have been killed in factional fighting since Abbas called last month for early elections to try to break a deadlock with Hamas over creating a unity cabinet. Hamas has since said unity talks had resumed.

Hamas refuses to recognise Israel's right to exist.

Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert held a long-awaited meeting on December 23, where they agreed to try to restart the peace process.

But Abbas has complained that Olmert has not made good on promises he made to lift roadblocks in the West Bank and release 100 million dollar in withheld Palestinian tax funds.

Rice will meet Olmert tomorrow.

She will also seek Arab help to stabilise Iraq during a Middle East trip that will include stops in Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait as well as Germany and Britain.

REUTERS SP BST1411